Puccini collaboration FOR 2021

27th November 2020

After several attempts, friend Mattia Campetti arranged a meeting with Luigi Viani who manages the Puccini Study Centre and Museum in Lucca. Luigi has been working from home recently whilst the Museum is closed under pandemic restrictions and so we met at my home instead.

The main reason for the meeting was to explain to Luigi my intention, with much input from friend Steve Cole, to produce quality prints of the portraits I have painted of Giacomo Puccini from various old photographs, postcards, and books. I wanted to gauge the Puccini Foundation’s opinion, firstly on my work and their view on the project I had in mind.

As an ex-pat permanent resident in Lucca for eight years I am aware of the importance Puccini is to the Lucchese and unsure of the general attitude towards ‘non-Italians’ using the image of Puccini. As we discussed, most black and white images of the maestro are over one hundred years old and their potential ownership and copyright regulations are uncertain.

Luigi was already aware of and admired some of my paintings as they have been on display in several locations locally such as the bars Turandot, Madame Butterfly and Manon Lescaut, as well as restaurants such Tosca and Puccini Ristorante. His reaction was extremely positive and thought that a collaboration with the Puccini Foundation was a good idea and that quality ‘limited-edition’ prints would be an ideal way to further promote Puccini to a mainly tourist public. Indeed, Luigi handed me a pack of Lucca’s famous ‘Toscano’ cigars that they had recently negotiated Puccini’s image to be on the packaging.

We agreed that displaying Puccini’s image on the pack of cigars was highly appropriate since Puccini was from an early age, a heavy habitual smoker of tobacco that was until a few years ago still manufactured within the walls of Lucca. There are several anecdotes about how Puccini enjoyed strolling around the outside of the tobacco factory on warm summer evenings smelling the pungent aroma of tobacco, a product that most likely contributed to his death after suffering throat cancer.

Luigi confirmed something I already suspected that Lorenzo Viani was his great great uncle and who was a good friend of Giacomo Puccini. Viani was born in Viareggio near the old docks in 1882 where his father had been in service at the Villa Borbone still set amongst the pine forests and natural parkland now known locally as Leccione. After losing employment there, the Viani family fell upon hard times and young Lorenzo’s character was viewed at school as rebellious and ill-disciplined.

In 1893 aged eleven, Lorenzo was ‘put to work in the shop of the barber Fortunato Primo Puccini’, where he remained as an apprentice for several years. There he met several leading political figures as well as Giacomo Puccini and artist Plinio Nomellini. Viani formulated socialist and anarchist political tendencies during what he perceived at the time, widespread class struggles. Nomellini saw the natural artistic talent within the young Viani and introduced him to the small painter’s community at Torre del Lago and Puccini’s Compagnia della Bohème. Aged eighteen, Lorenzo enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lucca between 1900 and 1903.

Viani’s politics continued to have strong socialist and anarchist tendencies whilst he also developed as an expressionist painter and engraver, as well as a writer and poet. Developing his own artist style, ‘in 1904 he was admitted to the Free School of Nude attached to the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where he attended the courses of Calosci and Giovanni Fattori, while continuing to demonstrate a clear intolerance for academic disciplines.’

Fattori was a well-known exponent of the Italian Macchiaioli movement that had begun in Tuscany since the mid-19th century.

Viani moved back to Viareggio after leaving Paris in 1908, having seen the retrospective of Van Gogh and meeting other artists such as Picasso. He received numerous local commissions such as panels for Viareggio’s railway station and exhibited locally.  In Rome his work drew the attention of Filippo Tomasso Marinetti (1876-1944) the founder of the Italian avant-garde Futurist movement and Benito Mussolini (1883-1945). Due to his socio-anarchist politics, he was sympathetic to the poor, derelict and dispossessed that can be seen in his writings and visual art which was contrary to the prevailing Fascist politics of that era.  

In 1933, having suffered ill health from asthma, Viani had a long stay in the psychiatric hospital at Maggiano near Lucca, finally succumbing to a fatal heart attack whilst working in Ostia, just outside Rome on 2 November 1934, the day after his 54th birthday.